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Preliminary Experiments on the Aural Significance of Parts of Tones of Orchestral Instruments and on Choral Tones

In a series of preliminary experiments we found that the attack transient is quite important in the aural identification of a nonpercussive instrument of the orchestra as compared with the steady state or the decay transient. The -attack transients- of percussive instruments are of very little significance for their identification. The circuits for several quiet gates which we developed are presented. The widths of the distributions and the number of partials are of aural significance in choral tones; the differences between the few laws of spacing that we studied seem relatively unimportant. Choral tones with widths of ±1 percent can be distinguished from solo tones for durations as short as 0.03 second.

Authors: Clark, Jr., Melville; Luce, David; Abrams, Robert; Schlossberg, Howard; Rome, James
Affiliation: Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
JAES Volume 11 Issue 1 pp. 45-54; January 1963 Import into BibTeX

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